Open two earthquake lists right after a quake and you may see two different magnitudes, two slightly different times or places. Nothing is broken. Recent earthquake lists come from seismological networks, and each agency runs its own stations, its own software and its own review process.

Seismic networks: the source of every list

An earthquake list is not made by an app. It starts at a seismological network: a set of seismometers spread across a region, sending their recordings to a processing center. Software and analysts there find the time, the location, the depth and the magnitude of each event, and the agency publishes the result.

Turkey has several such sources. Two public ones are AFAD's Earthquake Department, part of the national disaster management authority, and the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute at Boğaziçi University.…